NEWS,13.06.2013

Germany pledges €8bn for flood victims

Chancellor Angela Merkel said Thursday that Germany would set up a fund worth up to €8bn to help victims of record floods, which forced thousands from their homes and left a path of destruction.
The accord came at a meeting between Merkel, who has visited water-logged zones four times since the flooding began this month, and premiers of Germany's 16 states on the disaster's impact.
"The federal government and the states will each provide half of the national fund amounting to up to €8bn," Merkel told reporters after the meeting.
She dismissed calls to introduce new taxes or special levies to raise money for the relief fund, but said it would require a supplementary budget for this year.
The Bundestag lower house of parliament is to sign off on the financing by 5 July, the last session before the summer recess.
No official figure has yet been given for the cost of the damage in Germany from the floods which also deluged other central European countries. The death toll rose to 21 on Thursday after Romania reported two more dead from the flooding.
After the "worst-of-the-century" floods in 2002, a €6.5bn fund was set up.
Last week Merkel, who is campaigning for a third term in September elections, already pledged immediate aid of €100m.
Reiner Haseloff, premier of Saxony-Anhalt state, which has been badly hit by the flooding, had suggested in the daily Mitteldeutsche Zeitung a temporary increase of a tax levied on all personal income and businesses to help reconstruct former East Germany.
Water levels continued to slowly fall in northern Germany on Thursday and dykes were holding, including in Lauenburg in Schleswig-Holstein and Hitzacker in Lower Saxony, both of which were visited by Merkel on Wednesday.

Netanyahu vows: never another Auschwitz

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday opened a new Holocaust exhibition at the former Auschwitz death camp, vowing Israel would do everything to prevent another genocide of the Jewish people.
Sixty-five years on, "the only thing that has truly changed is our ability and our determination to operate in order to defend ourselves and to prevent another Holocaust," he said.
Netanyahu's comments came a day after he accused Tehran of planning another Holocaust, by developing nuclear weapons with the aim of destroying Israel.
"This is a regime that is building nuclear weapons to annihilate Israel's six million Jews," he said following talks with Polish counterpart Donald Tusk in Warsaw on Wednesday.
Israel "will not allow this to happen. We will never allow another Holocaust."
While saying that Israel should be eliminated, Tehran insists that its nuclear facilities are for peaceful purposes.
On Thursday, Netanyahu also accused the Allies of failing to act over the Nazi death camps.
They "understood full well what was happening in the death camps. They were requested to act, they could act, but they didn't," he said.
Netanyahu spoke after touring the new exhibition that was curated by Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust institute and features powerful visuals which put the killings at Auschwitz into the larger context of the Holocaust.
Black-and-white
The Israeli leader previously visited the former Nazi camp - now a memorial and museum run by Poland - in 2010 for the 65th anniversary of its liberation by Soviet troops.
Funded in part by Israel, the new "Shoah" or Holocaust exhibition is one of several national exhibitions at Auschwitz.
Israel's original display dated back to the communist era.
Located in Block 27, one of the red brick buildings that held the camp's prisoners, the new exhibition has a black-and-white colour scheme. It also uses a minimalist multimedia approach to show that what happened in Auschwitz from 1940-1945 - where around 1.1 million people were killed - was not an isolated event.
The Nazi's World War II genocidal "Final Solution" claimed the lives of six million of pre-war Europe's 11 million Jews.
The gallery contents range from a 360° cinematic montage of Jewish life before the Holocaust to a room-length Book of Names listing details of 4.2 million victims.
In one dark room, screens hanging from the ceiling project footage from Nazi Germany, including Adolf Hitler gesticulating madly while delivering a speech, as speakers blast Nazi chants.
From there, the atmosphere changes drastically as the visitor moves into a room showing the consequences of the anti-Semitism.
"As you can see, we left the room with a lot of noise and we entered into total silence. And this was done on purpose," Yad Vashem director and exhibition curator Avner Shalev said.
Extermination camps
The silent white room displays an enlarged map of Europe entitled the "Geography of Murder" showing all the extermination camps and sites where Jews were killed.
Nearby screens project photos of piles of bodies and skeletal, starving prisoners for a powerful display of how the systematic murder was carried out.
"It motivates you to think and rethink what does it mean... It gives you a push to think deeper. To maybe take some personal responsibility about your life," Shalev told AFP.
A highlight of the exhibition, one he calls the "heaviest part", is a room devoted to the 1.5 million Jewish children killed in the Holocaust.
It is empty save for small pencil drawings sketched directly onto the white walls at a child's eye-level.
Israeli artist Michal Rovner sorted through 6 000 drawings by children who died in the Holocaust and selected fragments to copy onto the walls, without "correcting or improving them".
They include depictions of houses, trains, soldiers, hangings, flowers and are not framed or behind glass but "brought back to the present time".
"My desire was to give them presence again, in the place that really tried to erase them from the world," Rovner told AFP, with historical recordings of children streaming in the background.

US recovers Holocaust kingpin's diary

US officials and the National Holocaust Museum announced on Thursday the recovery of the long-lost diary of a top Nazi war criminal that experts say could shed new light on the Holocaust.
The Rosenberg Diary, kept by Alfred Rosenberg, a confidant of Adolf Hitler whose racist theories underpinned Nazi Germany's annihilation of six million Jews, had been missing since the Nuremberg war crimes trials ended in 1946.
"Having material that documents the actions of both perpetrators and victims is crucial to helping scholars understand how and why the Holocaust happened," said Sarah Bloomfield, director of the National Holocaust Museum in Washington.
"The story of this diary demonstrates how much material remains to be collected and why rescuing this evidence is such an important Museum priority," said Bloomfield in a statement.
The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, a key player in finding the loose-leaf diary, said it had initially been taken by a Nuremberg prosecutor, Robert Kempner, "contrary to law and proper procedure."
Kempner, a German lawyer who fled to the United States during World War II and settled in Pennsylvania, held on to the diary, which covers a 10-year period from 1934, until his death in 1993, ICE said.
It remained missing until November 2012 when the US Attorney's office in Delaware and Department of Homeland Security special agents got a tip from an art security specialist working with the Holocaust museum.
"The Rosenberg Diary was subsequently located and seized pursuant to a warrant issued by the US District Court for the District of Delaware," ICE said, giving no details.
In his role as the Nazis' chief racial theorist, Rosenberg was instrumental in developing and promoting the notion of a German "master race" superior to other Europeans and, above all, to non-Europeans and Jews.
Born in 1893 into an ethnic German family in what is today Estonia, Rosenberg, who loathed Christianity and "degenerate" modern art, doubled as Hitler's point man in occupied eastern Europe and Russia throughout the war.
He was also tasked by Hitler to oversee the systematic plundering of countless works of art throughout occupied Europe, many of which remain missing to this day.
Captured by Allied troops at the end of the 1939 to 1945 war, Rosenberg was convicted at Nuremberg of war crimes, crimes against humanity, initiating and waging wars of aggression, and conspiracy to commit crimes against peace.
He was executed with several other convicted Nazi kingpins, Hermann Goering having cheated the hangman by committing suicide in his jail cell the night before, on 16 October 1946. He was 53.
"Rosenberg was dull and sunken-cheeked... His complexion was pasty-brown, but he did not appear nervous and walked with a steady step to and up the gallows," reported US journalist Howard Smith from the scene that day.
"Apart from giving his name and replying 'no' to a question as to whether he had anything to say, he did not utter a word.
"Ninety seconds after, he was swinging from the end of a hangman's rope. His was the swiftest execution of the 10."

Berlusconi wanted Gaddafi dead: Sources

Former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi wanted to resolve the Libyan civil war in 2011 with a covert operation to kill his friend Muammar Gaddafi, a high-ranking diplomatic source has told dpa.

Gaddafi was executed by insurgents in October 2011, after his convoy was hit by a Nato airstrike. The military alliance has said it did not deliberately target the leader, but since then there has been much speculation about foreign involvement in the killing.

"We had a prime minister during the Libyan crisis who, speaking about Gaddafi, told secret services: 'Why don't you kill him?'," the source, who is close to national security circles, said of Berlusconi.

The official did not elaborate on the specific request, but explained that intelligence services normally aim to "change things on the ground" by "proxy" - that is, by influencing the behaviour of local actors.

Il Fatto Quotidiano newspaper carried similar allegations in a front page story.

It interviewed Ignazio La Russa, a defence minister under Berlusconi, who said: "They would have certainly not told me, but it is possible. Berlusconi was worried about his position because he was seen as too close to the Libyan leader."

Good relations

However, Berlusconi spokesperson Paolo Bonaiuti has denied the report. "How can it be claimed that President Berlusconi had even thought about such an infamy?" he said in a statement.

Before the war, Berlusconi and Gaddafi nurtured good relations.

In 2008 they signed a controversial friendship agreement, in which Italy promised $5bn to compensate the North African country for transgressions during three decades of Italian colonial rule during the first half of the 20th century.

In exchange, Gaddafi pledged to assist Berlusconi's conservative government curb migrant flows across the Mediterranean by accepting the immediate deportation to Libya of people intercepted in international waters.

When Gaddafi died, Berlusconi commented in Latin, "sic transit gloria mundi" (thus passes the glory of the world), and noted: "now the war has ended".

Gaddafi, who ruled for 42 years, was ousted after eight months of civil war, in one of the so-called Arab Spring uprisings. Nearly 20 months on, Libya has not yet found stability, as the country's new rulers struggle to assert their authority and re-establish security.